Special issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era on the legacy of John Dewey's seminal work, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916)

Groeger, Cristina V. “Radicalism and Conservatism.” In Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The Making of Modern America, 362-378. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell: ed. Christopher Nichols and Nancy Unger, February 2017, 2017.Abstract

“Radicalism” and “conservatism” can only be historically understood in relation to each other, within a changing political common sense and balance of social power. The political landscape of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era does not neatly prefigure the political map of the twentieth century, but the roots of modern liberalism and conservatism lie in the central political struggles of this era: over the future of emancipated African Americans, the relation between labor and capital, the role of women in public life, the mechanisms of popular democracy, and the definition of civil liberties. This chapter traces the major political and social movements that defined the outer limits of political possibility between Reconstruction and the mid-1920s.

Drawing on a new database developed by Cristina Groeger with funding from BARI, this map allows users to visualize ward-level data on ethnicity, race, occupation, and school attendance in 1880, 1900, and 1930. This information can be used to illustrate a variety of different shifts that occurred in Boston over that period, including, but not limited to:

​The growth and changing locus of Boston’s Irish, Italian, Jewish, and African-American populations at a time when immigration and migration dramatically changed the city and its neighborhoods.

The significant economic and social changes that occurred as Boston's economy transitioned from unskilled labor to a reliance on white-collar jobs.

The rapid great expansion of secondary school enrollment and concurrent decline in youth participation in the work force following the education reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.